MADISON, Ind. – Every so often, a customer will put a six-pack on the counter with a quizzical look at the man with his white hair pulled back in a ponytail. “Wait, aren’t you …?” the conversation usually begins.

“A few people still recognize me,” John Kinman said with a smile. “They are all old, too.”

Kinman, 67, owns Fillin’ Station Liquors at the base of the bridge that connects Indiana to Kentucky over the Ohio River in Madison. Kinman bought this former filling station – it still looks, exactly, like a filling station – in 2011. Its location made it an easy decision.

“If you are going to have a liquor store, you might as well have one at the end of a bridge to a dry county,” Kinman said, pointing to U.S. Route 421, which connects Madison to Trimble County in Kentucky. “That was pretty much a no-brainer. I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll give it a shot.’”

Customers filed in and out on a recent weekday afternoon. Most have no idea that Kinman was once one of Indiana’s most prolific scorers in high school basketball. In 1968-69, in his senior season and the first year of the newly consolidated Switzerland County High School, Kinman scored 606 points, a school record that still stands today.

Gene Demaree, an Indiana Basketball Hall of Famer as a player at New Marion and the University of Tulsa, was a young coach in his 20s in 1968 when he arrived in Vevay, a quiet community of 1,500 on the Ohio River banks.

“I always said you never go through Vevay unless you are trying to get to Vevay,” Demaree said. “My first job was at Aurora, right out of college. Unfortunately, they had been to the Sweet Sixteen the year before (1966) and all of the players were gone except one role player. I had two .500 seasons and got fired. I learned a lot about coaching – you win with talent is one thing.”

The Fillin' Station Liquors in Madison.(Photo: Kyle Neddenriep)

Kinman, who grew up on a farm near Lamb, a few miles southwest of Vevay, had averaged more than 20 points a game as a junior in 1967-68, the final season for the Vevay Warriors. The school consolidated with neighboring Patriot the following year to form the Switzerland County Pacers.

“We played in a gym (it still stands and is used by elementary school teams) that was built in the 1930s and had walls about this high on each side,” Kinman said, holding his hand above his waist. “Of course, there wasn’t a whole lot of room. There was a three-foot line when you took the ball out of bounds that the defense had to stand behind and about eight or nine rows of bleachers on each side.”

The 6-2 Kinman earned a mention in Bob Williams’ “Shootin’ the Stars” column in the Star in January of 1969. In his first eight games, Kinman scored 269 points and was challenging players like Greenfield’s Mike Edwards and Washington’s George McGinnis for the state scoring title. Kinman ended up averaging 28.9 points per game for Switzerland County, which saw its inaugural season end in the second game of the sectional to – of all of teams – Aurora.

“He could dunk the ball and he could handle it well,” Demaree said of Kinman. “He was on the national honor society. He only had one fault – he didn’t shoot enough. That was maybe the fault of his coach, though.”

Kinman, who grew up idolizing Oscar Robertson in his Cincinnati Royals days in the NBA, estimates that he had about 40 college scholarship offers. The Baltimore Orioles also expressed interest in signing him as a baseball prospect. “Back then if you signed, you couldn’t play anything else (collegiately),” he said. “I’m not sure I would have made the show, but I probably could have made it up the ranks a ways.”

Demaree remembers hosting dinner for Georgia Tech basketball coach John “Whack” Hyder, who was nearing the end of a 22-year coaching career that saw him win 292 games (which still ranks second in program history). Kinman committed to Georgia Tech, in part, because his sister, Anne, was living in Atlanta.

“She had lost her husband in the Vietnam War,” Kinman said. “That made me want to go to Tech because it was in Atlanta.”

The small-town kid from Vevay walked into a different world in Atlanta in 1969.

“I didn’t have a ponytail when I left Vevay,” he said with a laugh. “My first concert was Janice Joplin. A whole new world opened up when I was at Tech.”

Freshman were ineligible for varsity games at the time, but Kinman led the freshman team in scoring in 1969-70. He did not stay. “I did not have the math background for Tech,” he said. “I probably should have gone to Ole Miss instead.”

Kinman ended up transferring to Mercer University in Macon, Ga. Schools in the south were just beginning to integrate, including Mercer.

“It was an interesting time to play ball in the south,” Kinman said. “It was a big change for a lot of people. Some people didn’t like it. We were an independent, but we had a lot of good players. We were in the process of transitioning from Division II to Division I so a lot of teams wouldn’t play us.”

Kinman played on the 1971-72 team that went 19-7 and played in the NCAA Division II national tournament, led by Billy Smith (drafted by the New York Knicks) and Leonard Hardin (drafted by the ABA’s Kentucky Colonels). But after two years at Mercer, Kinman decided to come home.

“There were a lot of reasons, but I had lost that fire,” Kinman said. “Don’t kid yourself – every kids that signs a letter of intent thinks he’s going to play for the Knicks or somebody. At some point in college, that fire had gone away.”

In 1975, Kinman landed in Bloomington and finished his degree at Indiana University. He worked at Lake Monroe for 10 years.

“I had a wonderful time in Bloomington,” he said. “I played in the city league and at IU. You could always find really good games against a lot of IU players. I was always playing basketball or softball.”

Kinman moved back to Vevay, got married at age 39 and owned a tavern in Vevay for 20 years with his wife, Libby. They now own two liquor stores in Madison. The ‘Fillin’ Station’ will soon be torn down to make way for new stretch of U.S. Route 421, which will run right through where the former gas station now stands.

“The plan is to build a new store and get it up and going,” Kinman said. “We’ll probably build somewhere along the corridor that will connect to Main Street.”

On a recent afternoon, Kinman was on the phone in his office at the ‘Fillin’ Station’ talking basketball, a subject that still comes up often. The little kid in him still hopes, someday, that he might run into Oscar Robertson.

“I still have his book,” Kinman said. “But I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him. I’d love to do that, just to shake his hand.”